Gorée Island

Gorée Island

The island of Gorée is situated off the coast of Senegal, facing Dakar. It is a small island 900 meters long and 350 meters wide, protected by the Cap-Vert Peninsula. It is now part of the city of Dakar, but was formerly a small port. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, it was the biggest slave trading center along the coast of Africa. The Portuguese, Dutch, English and French ruled it in succession, and its buildings contrast between the grim slave quarters and the elegant houses of the slave traders. The island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was one of the first 12 sites in the world to be designated as such in 1978. One of Gorée's landmarks is the House of Slaves, built by an Afro-French Métis family around 1780-1784. It is one of the oldest houses on the island and is used today as a tourist site to illustrate the horrors of the slave trade all over the Atlantic world. Other important buildings include the Maritime Museum, the Historical Museum of Senegal, the Government Palace, the Gorée Castle and the seventeenth-century Gorée Police Station. The site is a rare historical representation of a European colony, where free and enslaved Africans, Europeans and Afro-Europeans coexisted, even when the island was a major center of the Atlantic slave trade. Many contradictory and conflicting findings emerge from archaeological research on Gorée. At one end of the spectrum, slave peoples on Gorée Island were treated badly as animals, while at the other end of the spectrum there is evidence that slave peoples were accepted as family.